Women, feminism, and geek culture

Booth Grandmas at PAX Prime 2011

Apparently game company Good Old Games' booth at PAX prime this year featured booth grandmas passing out cookies. I was worried the PAX coverage would just make me sad that I couldn’t make it this year, but this just made me smile. Nice way to fit your booth staff into your retro-nostalgic theming! Also, cookies are totally awesome swag, and you don’t have to try to fit them into your suitcase on the way home.

Booth Grandmas passing out cookies at Good Old Games' PAX Prime 2011 booth

I got the picture from here, although I don’t know if that’s the original since I’ve seen it elsewhere.

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About terriko

Terri has a PhD in horribleness, assuming we can all agree that web security is kind of horrible. She stopped working on skynet (err, automated program repair and AI) before robots from the future came to kill her and got a job in open source, which at least sounds safer. Now, she gets paid to break things and tell people they're wrong, and maybe help fix things so that people won't agree so readily with the first sentence of this bio in the future.
Terri writes/tweets under the name terriko, enjoys making things and mentoring others and has a plain ol' home page at http://terri.toybox.ca.

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5 thoughts on “Booth Grandmas at PAX Prime 2011”

It’s definitely an improvement over sexual objectification, no argument there. But it’s also presenting women to geeks in a completely non-geeky and rather stereotyped way — they’re not geeks, they’re cookie-baking grandmas! — and targeting a specific group of women (senior women) that already has PLENTY of trouble getting cred in geek situations.

If Booth Grandma was geeking out Alton-style about the chemistry of cookie-baking, I’d be a little happier, you know?

I worry we’re tending towards a bit of a “no true scotsman” when it comes to women representing companies on trade show floors. They’re breaking a much bigger stereotype with the age thing than with the gender thing, incidentally. PAX is close to 50% female gamers, but less than 10% people over 40, I’d guess.

As for non-geekiness… cookie-baking is surprisingly strongly associated with geekiness at PAX. This is mostly due to the efforts of the Cookie Brigade: a team of volunteers that gives out cookies as thank yous for donations to the Child’s Play charity. Most attendees will see fellow geeks handing out cookies over the course of the weekend, or hear the announcements about how much the group has raised. So the cookies in this particular context actually fit more into the geek theme than they might at other events.

Also… The rule at PAX is that the booth staff has to know some about the products, so it’s entirely possible that the grandmas were up there gabbing about old games, which would be uber cool!